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Monday, December 15, 2014

The Government Knows Best

Barely four years after it was inaugurated with much
pomp and ceremony, Kenya’s new constitution is being undone. The Security
Amendment Bill introduced in Parliament last week portends the return of the
all-powerful, unchecked executive and its intrusion into almost every facet of
Kenyans’ lives.

Under the guise of giving the government the tools to fight
insecurity, the proposed gives government wide and unchecked discretion in
defining what constitutes a threat and taking measures to mitigate against it.
It cuts a large swathe through constitutionally guaranteed rights to privacy, fair
trial, assembly, information, expression and thought as well as freedoms from
arbitrary detention and even torture, in a misguided attempt to respond to
rising incidents of insecurity including terrorist attacks.

This atrocious piece of legislation is just the culmination
of a long period of Kenyan elites undermining the foundations of liberal
democracy in Kenya. The fact is, while the adoption of the new constitution
should have heralded the democratisation of government, the logic of tyranny
was largely left intact.

In Kenya, as elsewhere, the fight for freedom has primarily
boiled down to a struggle against the notion that government and ruling elites
know what’s best. From colonial times, the people in power have disguised their
oppression under a proclaimed special knowledge and patronising parental
concern for those they oppressed. The British claimed to govern in the
interests of the native population, to be the altruistic purveyors of
civilisation, even as they murdered, looted and repressed.

However, it is plain that many who led the struggle for
freedom, did not themselves fundamentally reject this idea. Successive
post-independence governments similarly claimed to be “baba na mama” to the
Kenyans they were robbing blind and whose rights they were trampling underfoot.
For them, it was not oppression that was the problem, but rather who it was
doing the oppressing. Following their footsteps, in 2003 the late John Michuki,
a former colonial enforcer reinvented as a minister in the government of Mwai
Kibaki which ended four decades of despotic KANU rule, suggested that constitutional reforms were no longer necessary since the sole
objective had been to unseat the dictator, Daniel arap Moi.

In fact, with Moi’s demise, the struggle ceased to be about
principles and increasingly became about power, and between those who had it
and those who wanted it. Many of the leading lights of civil society and the
church marched straight into government and into the annals of corruption and
kleptocracy. Not only was there a failed attempt to foist a bastardized version
of a new constitution on Kenyans in 2005, but by 2007, the electoral
arrangements that had been negotiated with Moi to ensure a credible poll in
2002, were being rolled back.

Following yet another round of election related
blood-letting, a new constitution was inaugurated in 2010 which was meant to
change the way our politics worked. But, as last week sadly showed, that is yet
to take root. Too many ordinary Kenyans have been seduced into thinking that the
government knows best, that it is actually the checks on the arbitrary exercise
of power that are the problem, that instead of protecting constraining rogue
government, the constitution is making us more vulnerable to terrorism. Despite
the fact that it has largely failed to implement the security system as
envisaged in our constitution and laws, the government has spun its own
incompetence into a narrative of excessive constitutional restraints.

So once again we hear the refrain that “Uhuru Kenyatta is not Moi. You
can trust him with power.” The false narrative is propagated that it was Moi, not the concentration of unchecked power in the Presidency, that led to the state-sponsored terror that killed many more Kenyans and destroyed many more Kenyan lives than its religiously and ideologically inspired cousin. We even hear
talk that some oppression is actually fine, even desirable, and that Moi, who has today been
rehabilitated from oppressive and kleptocratic tyrant to strong and wise
leader and elderly statesman, was an effective bulwark against terrorism, even
as he massacred and terrorized.

Kenya’s slide into the seductive embrace of authoritarianism
has been aided by the silencing of alternative voices, the continuing demonization
of civil society and the lobotomising of the news agenda. Its purpose is to
keep the citizenry divided, blind and uninformed, only privy to the official
truths of government spin-masters. The publication of government press releases
as news by the insipid media, and the Church’s support for tyranny demonstrate
just how successful the government has been.

The Security Amendment Bill is the fruit of these efforts
and Parliament’s rush to adopt it is proof that the idea of the Assembly as a
check on Executive excess and not a rubber stamp for its decisions, has also
been abandoned.

In the end, it is the people who must do the work of
protecting the country from its government, the labour of upholding the
constitution. While some, under the banner of “civil society” or “opposition”
can take the lead, it does not absolve the citizen from this duty. Just as it
is the ordinary Kenyan who will suffer from the worst excesses of unaccountable
government, it is we who must resist its re-emergence.

We must not be suckered by the false notion that the
government knows best. It doesn’t. And even when we might be inclined to
believe its good intentions, history shows, it doesn’t stay that way for long.
Those you think are on your side today may very well turn out to be your oppressors
tomorrow and the laws being cheered on today will be the yoke of tomorrow’s
subjugation. That is the reality that Kenyans will sooner or later have to wake
up to.